Every album I’ve ever encountered seems to have a mixture of bangers and one or more meh or outright flops. It’s easier than ever to skip over the tracks now, but as the question asks: what’s is, in your opinion, the perfect album, or does one/can one even exist?
I was wondering the same thing and then I found Pink Floyd - The Dark Side of the Moon.
So the answer is yes, my perfect album exists.
And then I found Pink Floyd - Wish You Were Here, and I realized two perfect albums exist for me, so far
No, but there can be perfect albums for an individual.
For me, there’s a decent number. I tend to have broad taste in music, so I have the advantage of genre access in this kind of thing.
Master of Puppets, Metallica, was the first perfect album I ran across. Not a single track I wanted to skip, and it’s still pretty much impossible for me to make a playlist that includes Metallica that doesn’t have the entire album on it. For years, I would play it to go to sleep to, my tape deck could auto flip, so I would just dub a few from the vinyl (showing my age here lol) and use them for that.
Iron Maiden’s Somewhere in Time is another.
Adele, 21 is brilliant from front to back.
Tracy Chapman, New Beginning is a fucking masterpiece.
Springsteen’s Born in the USA is perfect.
Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, the album by that name is a great one.
Depeche Mode, Violator. There’s not a stinker on it.
Guns & Roses, Appetite for Destruction was and is a perfect album for sure.
John Lennon did it with Imagine, though barely; there are a couple of tracks that aren’t as good as the rest, but they’re still amazing overall.
Linkin Park could have two; One More Light is definitely perfect in my ears, and hybrid theory is right there with it, though I don’t mind skipping a couple of tracks off of HT sometimes.
Nappy Roots managed a perfect hip-hop album (which isn’t actually easy with me) in Watermelon, Chicken and Grits. Sublimely perfect southern rap. Every track a winner.
Biggie did Ready to Die, and I’d argue it’s the second best hip-hop album of all time.
The greatest is Run-DMC with Raising Hell. How can you top that album as a whole? Every track a banger, every rhyme a killer.
The list could go on. Obviously, I tend to lean into rock, metal, and hip-hop as my most listened genres, but there’s at least one album for me in almost any genre. I’m sure if I delved deeper in some, I would find more.
Paul Simon - Graceland is utterly unique and every track is a masterpiece
The same can be said for Pink Floyd - The Wall
Queen - A kind of Magic
Alanis Morissette - Jagged Little Pill
As other have said, it’s subjective, but here are some albums I’d consider perfect:
- R.E.M. - Murmur, Reckoning, Lifes Rich Pageant, Automatic for the Prople
- Orbital - In Sides
- Marvin Gaye - What’s Going On
- Leftfield - Leftism
- Beatles - Abbey Road, Sgt Pepper
- Spiritualized - Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space
- Underworld - Second Toughest in the Infants
- Miles Davis - Kind of Blue
- Massive Attack - Blue Lines
- John Coltrane - Blue Train
- Velvet Underground - Velvet Underground and Nico
- Bob Dylan - Highway 61 Revisited
- Nas - Illmatic
- Portishead - Dummy, Portishead
- Chemical Brothers - Exit Planet Dusr
- Tricky - Maxinquaye
- Jim White - The Mysterious Tale of How I Shouted Wrong-Eyed Jeaus
Blue Lines over Mezzanine? I usually mention Mezzanine in threads like this because the fact it was released in 1998 really doesn’t come across at all.
Let It Be by The Replacements
Surprised nobody mentioned Rumors by Fleetwood Mac.
It’s a great album but there is one song on it that is pretty mid, Oh Daddy. I don’t think it can be called the perfect album
I disagree. I know that one’s not as typical/upbeat as much of their other stuff, but I think it carries just as much weight and is a powerful song that helps complete the album.
French album for those who speak French : Les Étoiles Vagabondes - Nekfeu
Makes me go through all emotions, excellent writer. It is just the best album to me.
Haven’t heard it, but I’ll look it up. There’s Italian. Japanese, Malay, etc in my collection. I don’t really understand much, but some of the music is brilliant. Thanks!
Plenty. There are literally hundreds of albums in my collection that I’d consider “perfect,” the first one I ever realized as one was Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust and the most recent probably being Hellfire by Black Midi. What type of music do you listen to? I can try to give some more relevant suggestions for you based on that.
Bowie also had Man Who Sold the World and Station to Station.
I feel like the perfect album can exist for anyone. Sometimes an album hits just right at a specific time in your life. It becomes the background soundtrack for your day to day life. For me, it is The Postal Service’s Give Up. There are so many reasons I love that album and to me there are no throwaway songs. It feels altogether ephemeral for me.
So yeah, it’s highly subjective, but I think it’s possible for all of us to experience music on this level. I hope you one day experience it, OP.
Heh. For me, in college in the early 90s, nirvana, green day, Soundgarden, etc. But yeah, there’s always one that doesn’t quite seem to fit. Lol
Perfect albums that come to mind :
Pink Floyd - Animals
Depeche Mode - Violator
Fleetwood Mac - Rumours
Dire Straits - Dire Straits
Curtis Mayfield - Superfly
Daft Punk - Discovery
Iron Maiden - Seventh Son of a Sseventh Son
Death - Symbolic
Rush - Moving Pictures
Wallflowers - Bringing Down the Horse
You fucked up the markdown. You need to put two newlines between or a bullet point before each line.
Or two spaces after a line.
Like this. It renders tighter.Thanks, corrected it !
F♯ A♯ ∞ by Godspeed You! Black Emperor
Name the genre and I’ll give you one.
Edit: not like make the album, I’ll just tell you about one
Alternative/ grunge.
Or movie OST.
Nirvana unplugged in new York
Eh… the best stuff on their unplugged set was the covers. Bowie and Meat Puppets tracks. Hard to give an album a “best of its kind” designation when the best tracks are covers
That’s a weird qualifier. The album is perfect. The question wasn’t “is it perfect if you omit cover songs?”
Tool – 10,000 Days
Oh yeah that one’s a good one
No. Next question.